PRESS RELEASE

May 18, 2017 (EIRNS)—In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published yesterday, Tu Guangshao, president of the China Investment Corp. (CIC) sovereign wealth fund, reported that "there is a potential for Chinese companies to make more investments in the U.S. and vice versa." One sign of that is that, tomorrow, CIC will open offices in New York City, replacing the one in Toronto, which until now, had been CIC’s only overseas representative office.

Tu explained that CIC is particularly looking at U.S. projects in highways, rail, and high-tech manufacturing plants, emphasizing that the CIC can become a stable source of long-term capital for U.S. infrastructure and manufacturing projects, as well as helping U.S. companies to expand their operations in China’s market.

In January of this year, CIC chairman Ding Xuedong indicated that the CIC wanted to change $50 billion of its holdings of U.S. Treasury debt into an investment in building of new infrastructure in the United States. Ding’s estimate of the investment needed to build a new and modern economic infrastructure in America was a very large $8 trillion—far beyond President Trump’s $1 trillion program—which, he said, would not be invested by the U.S. government and private investors alone. Schiller Institute chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche has enthusiastically supported such a proposal, noting that it would represent an exciting new level of Sino-U.S. collaboration to rebuild the U.S.’s decaying infrastructure.

In the Journal interview, Tu notes that, in the past, the U.S. investment environment has frustrated CIC direct investment, and pointed to the "overly strict scrutiny and opaque investment-review process" of U.S. authorities. Chinese officials have complained about the unfair review process by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), and Tu is urging U.S. authorities to improve the transparency of the process.